People demonstrate outside the Supreme Court building in Washington in this photo from late March, when the court heard oral arguments in two same-sex marriage cases. (CNS photo/Nancy Phelan Wiechec)

In the wake of this morning’s Supreme
Court decisions on the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition
8, reactions and responses have, of course, flooded websites, blogs, and social
media sites. Below is a small sampling of those worth your time and attention. There
will only be more to come as the national discussion on these issues continuesstay
tuned!

As one might expect, President Obama responded favorably to
the rulings; his statement included a reference to religious freedom:

On an issue as sensitive as this, knowing that Americans hold
a wide range of views based on deeply held beliefs, maintaining our nation’s
commitment to religious freedom is also vital. How religious institutions
define and consecrate marriage has always been up to those institutions.
Nothing about this decision  which applies only to civil marriages  changes
that.

A good deal of analysis has focused on Justice Anthony Kennedy’s assertion
in majority opinion of the DOMA decision that the federal law has as its
purpose “to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws,
sought to protect in personhood and dignity.”

But
the majority says that the supporters of this Act acted with malicewith the
“purpose” (ante, at 25) “to disparage and to injure” same-sex couples. It says
that the motivation for DOMA was to “demean,” ibid.; to “impose inequality,”
ante, at 22; to “impose . . . a stigma,” ante, at 21; to deny people “equal
dignity,” ibid.; to brand gay people as “unworthy,” ante, at 23; and to “humiliat[e]”
their children, ibid. (emphasis added).

I
am sure these accusations are quite untrue. To be sure (as the majority points
out), the legislation is called the Defense of Marriage Act. But to defend
traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would
prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the
United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such
accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment,
any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To
question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to
act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to “disparage,” ”injure,”
“degrade,” ”demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow
citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no
more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our
society for most of its existenceindeed, had been unquestioned in virtually
all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society
to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging
those who oppose it hostes humani generis,
enemies of the human race.

Peter
Lawler sees in Kennedy’s ruling an “unhinged moralism” that “might make
solid citizens believe that those who disagree with himincluding the overwhelming
majority of members of our Congress who voted for the DOMAare hatefully evil,
so evil that their opinions deserve no place under our law or our Constitution.
Talk about a ‘conversation stopper,’ not to mention a civic-engagement stopper.”

Notre Dame Law professor Richard
Garnett on the Kennedy opinion: “Reading
Justice Kennedy's opinion -- which strikes me as a mixture of a ‘federalism’
argument and a Romer v. Evans ‘no amimus’ argument -- it strikes me that the
language and rhetoric will be very helpful to those who are arguing that the
Constitution, political morality, and decency require the equal treatment and
legal recognition of same-sex marriages. His claim that the opinion is
limited in its application to those same-sex marriages that have already been
recognized by state law does not strike me as likely to have much impact. If
what Justice Kennedy says is correct, then it seems to me that it has to
follow, in the next case and in future legislative debates, that those states
-- and those religious communities -- that reject the revisionist approach to
marriage are appropriately regarded as backward and bigoted, and not to be
respected or accommodated. We'll see.”

The
Court declined to declare same-sex marriage a fundamental right and left the
future of marriage policy for individual states to decide. …

Justice
Kennedy wrote for a 5-4 majority in U.S.
v. Windsor that the federal Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional on
grounds that it violates the equal protection clause of the fourteenth
amendment. The practical effect of the decision is that same-sex marriage will
be recognized in all instances of federal law dealing with marriage. Same-sex
couples in states that have enacted same-sex marriage laws will now be granted
the same federal benefits and regulations as married couples. The decision in
no way undermines marriage laws in the thirty-eight states that have defined
marriage as one man and one woman. …

In
Hollingsworth v. Perry Chief Justice
Roberts wrote for the majority in determining that citizens of California
lacked standing to sue on behalf of Proposition 8, the initiative defining
marriage as one man and one woman in California law. The Ninth Circuit decision
was tossed, leaving the original District Court decision. That decision applies
to just the two couples named in the suit (same-sex advocates declined to file
a class-action suit) leaving the future of marriage policy in California in
question. What is clear is that the decision has no bearing on marriage laws in
any other state.

The Court ignored the votes of a large bipartisan majority of
Members of Congress. It is absurd for the Court to suggest that Congress does
not have the power to define the meaning of words in statutes that
Congress itself has enacted. Just as the states have
constitutional authority to make state policy about marriage, so too Congress
has constitutional authority to pass a federal statute defining a term for
federal programs created by federal law.

DOMA imposes no uniform
definition of marriage upon the individual states, and the states should not be
able to impose varying definitions of marriage upon the federal government.

Moving away from
strictly legal analysis of today’s rulings, over at Christianity Today Russell
Moore maintains that the Supreme Court has given Christians a gift: “the opportunity to do what Jesus
called us to do with our marriages in the first place: to serve as a light in a
dark place.”

Permanent, stable marriages with families
with both a mother and a father may well make us seem freakish in 21st-century
culture. But is there anything more "freakish" than a crucified
cosmic ruler? Is there anything more "freakish" than a gospel that
can forgive rebels like us and make us sons and daughters? Let's embrace the
freakishness, and crucify our illusions of a moral majority.

That means that we must repent of
our pathetic marriage cultures within the church. For too long, we've refused
to discipline a divorce culture that has ravaged our cultures. For too long,
we've quieted our voices on the biblical witness of the distinctive missions of
fathers and mothers in favor of generic messages on "parenting."

For too long, we've acted as
though the officers of Christ's church were Justices of the Peace, marrying
people who have no accountability to the church, and in many cases were
forbidden by Scripture to marry. Just because we don't have two brides or two
grooms in front of us, that doesn't mean we've been holding to biblical
marriage. … This means we have the opportunity,
by God's grace, to take marriage as seriously as the gospel does, in a way that
prompts the culture around us to ask why.

Simcha
Fisher sees a similar reality on the horizon, but takes a somewhat less
optimistic view of it:

You need to know what's
coming next, if it's not already here.

Nationwide gay marriage is
probably a foregone conclusion. It's sort of like a law that you have to
pass to find out what's in it: once gay marriage is commonplace, and is
widely accepted as equal to heterosexual marriage, it will be safer for gay
couples to stop pretending to be monogamous. And mark my words,
this idea of culturally acceptable optional monogamy will stream quickly into
heterosexual marriage, until the word "infidelity" will sound stodgy
and obsolete to everyone's ears, gay or straight. "Infidelity"
as a sin will rankle our sensibilities, and will sound about as
dire as other unfashionable shalt-nots, like indocility, or a failure
to be meek. It will become something that only prudes and witless
sheep will fret about.

Today, infidelity still
sounds like a bad thing to most people's ears. And that's a good thing. If
gay marriage becomes commonplace, it's only a matter of time before we lose the
very notion of infidelity. God help us. We've given up preserving
our sense of virtue. If only we can cling to some sense of sin.

Elizabeth
Scalia (lots of good links at her post, as well) adds: “Man oh man, are we
paying for forty years of bad catechesis, now!” and notes, along
with Terry Mattingly, that the deep divisions among Catholics in the pews on
gay marriage are mirrored by the divisions among Catholics on the Court itself.

People demonstrate outside the Supreme Court building in Washington in this photo from late March, when the court heard oral arguments in two same-sex marriage cases. (CNS photo/Nancy Phelan Wiechec)

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